Back to the Hotel

We headed out of the hall, stopping along the way to nudge some teams that
asked for nudges. We piled into the van. I wriggled into the
back seat. It took some wriggling: I'm pretty tall, and it was set up for
short people. I actaully got stuck but eventually figured out a way
to angle myself around.

For the van ride back, we talked about puzzles. We'd all worked on
different ones, and now we had some down time to compare notes. How had
the psychic puzzle worked?

Back at the hotel, I wriggled out of the back seat. I got stuck again.
It was kind of embarrassing.

We went back to our rooms, looked in toilets. Behind one, we found a
piece of paper telling us to look under the mattress. Under the matress,
we found some awesome team magnetic signs for our van and instructions
for tomorrow morning: gather in the lobby at 8:45. We knew not to have
breakfast before the game because that would be provided at clue #3.
Now, it was just 11:00pm, time to get some shut-eye.

That's when I realized I didn't have my mobile phone with me. Oh no,
would we have to go back to the Memorial Hall? Joe walked me down to the
van. There was my phone on the floor, at the spot where I'd got
stuck trying to exit the van. No way was I trying to ride
in the van's back seat any more.

Sleep did not come easy. My brain was stuck in puzzling mode. I woke up
with a revelation: I finally understood that the "nella" in the domain name
nella.org was the owner's last name backwards.
How many times had I seen that domain name without noticing the connection?
And was it so important that my brain notice it now, late at night?
Shut up brain, let me go back to sleep.

Game Day

The next morning, we gathered in the hotel lobby. GC folks were wandering
around, asking: Had anyone seen Bob Schaffer?
He was supposed to be driving in,
but nobody had seen him. I wasn't looking for him too hard.
I'd been surprised that Bob's character had
survived the previous evening. I suspected (correctly, as it turned out)
that he was now done for.

Eventually, we were instructed to make our way out in back of the hotel
where there was a gazebo. Under the gazebo was a screen for a video
presentation. There was a bag of snacks for each team. Sarah remarked on
Blood and Bones' realization from the Mooncurser's Game a few years back
in Seattle: eating full meals
is great. Instead of living on beef jerkey, cookies, and peanut
butter sandwiches. If you can, sit down for a real meal with real food.
You'll solve better. The Mooncurser's folks had provided regular meals
during their hunt. Now this Seattle-transplant game would also provide
meals. Hopefully, this would keep our brains well-fed and less stupid.

Greg deBeer was in the crowd, sporting a non-evil non-van Dyke beard.
It wasn't supposed to be an evil beard. It wasn't for Movember.
He was growing it out for a
boardgame convention coming up the next weekend: he and friends had all
grown whiskers and were all going to shave them off, a little each day,
during the convention.

One team was the "Deadbeat Dads"—some fathers who were cashing
in their family karma to get away for a weekend The Game. We pointed
them out to Joe Fendel, asked what his kids thought about him taking off
for the weekend. Of course, Joe's kids like puzzlehunts, but a The Game
might be a bit much for them. "Dad, we could totally stay awake for
thirty hours... in a van... with you.." "You'd hardly know we were here!"
"Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Have we solved it yet? Have we solved
it yet?"

Eventually, Rich Bragg got up in front of us: There was still no sign of
Bob. So Rich would wing it. Did everyone know what they were supposed to
do? "When do we arrange flowers?" somebody asked.
And then: someone delivered a movie disc in lieu of Bob, and GC played
it on the video screen. This delivered the expected twist: Bob's character
had been disappeared by an evil-bearded fellow in the video. It was
kind of hard to hear what he was saying. The PA playing outside wasn't
so clear. I got
confused about the game's plot. The bearded guy seemed to be from the
Evil League of Evil; why was he talking to us? We weren't in the League,
were we? We were in the World Henchmen Organization? Wouldn't getting to
hench for a member of the Evil League of Evil come later? I got ahold of
myself: this was a The Game. Don't let the plot twists distract from
the puzzles. Stay on target.

The Chase is On

He gave us a pass phrase to unlock our first puzzle: "Where's the Van?"
Teams were typing that into their laptops—and then hustling away
in search of a space to sit down, gather around the laptop, and solve a
puzzle.

We whisked inside the hotel, plopped down at a table in the
restaurant area, and brought up our puzzle: a video.
It showed clips from movies (and maybe television) depicting
villains. We kinda were able to identify a few of them, couldn't
figure out what to do with them. Who was that villian?
Who was that vampire, Barnabas Collins maybe? (No.)
Who was this villain played by Ving Rhames? (It wasn't Ving Rhames; it
was Michael Clarke Duncan in Daredevil. At one point, one of us
thought it might be a clip from Daredevil, but we talked ourselves
out of it.) Some folks on the team knew that the villain of that story was
The Headless Horseman and not Ichabod Crane... but those folks weren't the
ones keeping notes on the data we collected.

There were automatically-released hints.
That is, every so often, our laptop would show us a hint.
We leaned pretty hard on the hints for this puzzle, let them lead us
along by the nose.

In hindsight, we could have used Google Goggles to help us to identify
the movies/shows/villains. If we'd identified more of those, maybe we
could have figured out the gimmick. In the end, a hint nudged us pretty
hard towards the gimmick, and one of us was able to struggle along with
the data from the villains we'd successfully identified to come up with
a solution. I was kind of worried as we emerged from this puzzle;
almost all the other teams had left by the time we finished.
I reminded myself that I didn't care if we were slower than other teams.
On the other hand, standing around and failing to identify TV and
movie characters wasn't much fun. What did I want? I didn't know.

Get in the Van

We got our gear together, got up from our table, headed out to the van.
As our reward for getting through the first puzzle, the laptop had given
us our next destination: Osage Park in Danville. We were going to Danville!
This game would introduce me to Pleasanton, Danville, and other bastions
of suburban depravity. Soon the GPS was programmed, we were ensconced in
the van, and on our way.

As we zipped along, we were still trying to reverse-solvishly
identify movies. We talked about
the good part of timed hints: if there's someone on your team who hates
taking hints, they might not mind taking timed hints. This might help
cut short some really long puzzles. Those of us who'd played in the
Griffiths game reminisced about the penrose tile minesweeper puzzle.

Non-non-heinous

At the park, we hopped out of the van. Someone was waving at us from the
other side of a playground: aha, it was GC volunteer Trisha Lanznester.
She'd no doubt played as part of the Burnin' Aiders team for this The
Game's original run up in Seattle,
and was now volunteering at this re-run in the bay area. Trying to be
all menacing, I said "Nice place you got here. It would be a pity if a
bunch of henches showed up and started messing it up." Trisha would not
be cowed, but pointed us at our puzzle, saying "You have to commit your
own crimes". Our puzzle was
a bag of candy; to solve it, we needed to take it. "You know what would
make this perfect for us villianous types," I said, "is if we had to take
it from a–" I looked down: there was a baby doll in a little stroller
at my feet. GC was miles ahead of me.

This was a word puzzle. We were better at those than at identifying movies.
We had many little wrapped candies, each of whose wrapper had a big letter
attached to it. We also had a big foam-core fake lollipop with short phrases
written on it. Tugging at the lollipop revealed that the decoration on
its stick was actually a strip of paper. Unraveling that revealed some
crossword-ish definitions with flavors.

Candies, sorted by flavors yielded letter-sets. Those could be arranged
into words that matched definitions on the decorative paper. The lollipop
phrases crossword-clued to other words—each of which was an anagram
of a candy word with an extra letter. "Taking candy" (the extra letter)
from each word gave us the letters for another phrase: sweet tooth.
It was a quick solve, and it felt good, especially after our struggles
with the movie clips. (A cynical person might wonder: why drive through
Danville's meandering residential streets to reach a puzzle solved in
less than 10 minutes? But the morale boost was worth it.)

Saturday: Breakfast

Soon we were back in the van, heading out to our next clue.
We talked about food clues from other games. We talked about the
soda-smelling clue from Shinteki Aquarius. Blood and Bones had smelled
one bottle first&dash;the water. Since that hadn't smelled like anything,
they'd figured that it wasn't a smell-based clue and had tried other things
for a long while.

There was some conjecture: why had GC asked us to bring a full set of
Scrabble tiles. Would we have to compose a Scrabble story? I wasn't sure
what a Scrabble story was, but it sounded like something tricky to make.
Maybe it was making a story using only one set of Scrabble tiles. Joe
Fendel had made one a while back, but didn't have it on him. We talked
about teaching techniques, since Sarah was a teacher, which could have been
an interesting topic, but by then we were at our destination: a sports bar
in Walnut Creek.

This sports bar was hosting an unusual party: 10 o'clock in the morning,
nerds singing karaoke, nerds solving puzzles, and breakfast. We got a
slow start on this puzzle. We were handed a puzzle and some karaoke tickets.
Our instructions: before we started solving the puzzle, we had to submit
a karaoke ticket. Things broke down quickly, since most of the team hadn't
heard those instructions (the noise from the karaoke was pretty loud).
Then followed a few minutes of the team meandering through this sports
bar, some folks trying to solve the clue, and some folks (who'd heard the
instructions) trying to prevent the first set of folks from solving the clue.
All this tangled up with trying to find a free table for solving and fill
out a karaoke ticket. Eventually, we filled out a ticket for Sarah to
sing song "A", Sarah spotted a table near the karaoke stage, and we were
in business.

I didn't really follow our progress on this puzzle: it turns out that
noisy karaoke doesn't really help a team to huddle around a puzzle.
Instead, I concentrated on the breakfast bar, specifically the fact that
it had run out of forks by the time I got to it. I learned to
scoop up scrambled eggs using toast as a tool, but not very well.
Meanwhile, other folks on the team tackled the clue.

We had a sheet of heavily mondegreened lyrics. If we couldn't identify a
song from these lyrics, we could request to karaoke-sing it. Our brave
singer would then get to see the lyrics on the karaoke machine. Folks in
the audience could then either recognize the song from its music or else
Google the lyrics. Folks on our team looking at the mondegreens were
able to mostly identify the songs. (I wasn't totally useless for this part;
occasionally someone would look up from the huddle, lean over and ask me to
Google some lyrics.) Taking one letter from each (I never
found out how) gave us MURDER OF ONE, the title of a song.

Requesting that
song on the Karaoke inspired site monitor Curtis to hand us a sheet with
the lyrics to Murder of One along with some algebra at the bottom. Murder
of One apparently contains an old nursery rhyme that goes
"One for sorrow / Two for joy / Three for a girl / Four for
a boy..." Our mondegreened lyrics mentioned things like girls and joy
and were identified by letter. So maybe A+L meant to look at the
sorrow/joy/girl/boy words from songs A and L, map them to numbers via
the nursery rhyme, then add up those numbers.
This gave us 8 6 7 5 3 0 9 2 1 14 4. Mapping to letters, using 0 as a
space yielded HFGEC IBAND. "BAND" looked promising. The rest not so much.
We stared at that for a while. What were we missing? We double-checked
our figuring. We stared some more. Minutes ticked away. By this time,
most teams were on this stage of the puzzle, nobody was singing karaoke.
The good news was that I could now find out from my team-mates how things
were going with the puzzle. The bad news was: we were stumped.
Finally, an idea of desperation: if we put "BAND" off to the side, that
left seven numbers, all in 0-9. Maybe it was a phone number? Maybe we
should call it? Then someone recognized the phone number 867-5309 was
the number from that "Jenny" song from the 80s. "867-5309 band" was
TOMMY TUTONE.

I felt some regret: when I'd been putting together the 2-Tone Game, I'd
looked at Tommy Tutone a little before figuring out I couldn't make a
good puzzle out of them. Now I wished I'd internalized more of what
I'd learned. As we headed out of the sports bar back to the van, there
weren't many teams left in the bar. How long had we sat there staring
at that phone number, not recognizing it?

Force

Back at the van, we threw bags in the back, piled into seats.
We told the GPS our next destination: an address
in Benicia. We zipped out of the parking lot and were off– until we
noticed that we'd left the van's back door open, the door to the cargo
area with all of our bags. Gah. A quick stop to close the back door.
A slow drive back to the sports bar to find things that we'd dropped. (We
hadn't dropped any, whew.) OK, now we were driving off to an
address in Benecia.

We reflected on the puzzle just past. Allen appreciated Sean Gugler's
heartfelt singing. We got to talking about company dress codes. Erik
talked about some visitors to his office who'd insisted on finding
out what appropriate attire was before visiting. "Casual" wasn't specific
enough. How to explain casual; if you say "clown pants and a bathing cap
would not be out of bounds" would that put these people at ease, or would
they all have shown up in, y'know, clown pants and bathing caps? I passed
along the Wayne Rosing dress code: not naked. Alexandra said that
she'd gone to the opera in her pajamas once. Sarah taught at a private
school for which teachers had a dress code: no flip-flop sandals, no jeans.

We wondered about the future: if we were going up to Benicia, might we
go through San Francisco? Some approval: we were going to places that
no The Game had sent us to before. Erik and Sarah knew Dr Horrible better
than most of us; Erik looked at the puzzles we'd seen so far and spotted
the reference.
Our morning puzzles
were from some Dr Horrible song lyrics in which Bad Horse sends Dr
Horrible a message about how to qualify for the Evil League of Evil

so let the games begin
A heinous crime, a show of force
(a murder would be nice of course)

The murder had been our karaoke "Murder of One".
Our candy-from-a-baby puzzle had been titled "Heinous
Crime". The puzzle we were riding to now was titled "A Show of Force".
Did this mean that we were applying to get into the Evil League of Evil,
no longer content with henching? Folks riding in the back seat started
watching Dr Horrible, either because they were researching for future
game references or because it was a good show to watch during a long
car ride. Sarah was playing with Siri, a new iPhone voice-recognition
application. Siri had several easter eggs, and Sarah showed them off.
This got us into talking about Wolfram Alpha, and databases that supported
entity search instead of just word search. Alexandra had been curious
about this since she'd talked with Jutta Degener about Freebase.

It was about this time that we figured out that we'd gone to Benicia's
West H Street. Unfortunately, we were supposed to drive to East H
Street, and there was a body of water between where we were and our
destination. But we got ourselves turned around and drove to the right spot.
And it was a great spot.

One photo of the Nourot pumpkins, copied from their blog.
Click it to see more photos

We were at the Nourot
Glass Studio. It was pretty spectacular. There were a bunch of
autumn-themed places out,
bright orange pumpkin decorations rendered in
glass, seeming at once to flow like liquid and to be plumply thumpable
like more, y'know, vegetabular pumpkins.
Those were obviously not what we were here for, though. There were
several glass eyes on a little table, each one with a label marking it
for one team. Apparently, we were here to pick up a big glass eye.

We took it outside. We weren't exactly sure what to do with it. I can't
speak for the rest of the team, but I was kind of nervous about walking
around in that glass studio with my big bulky backpack swinging around
behind me. And taking it outside was the right thing to do. We examined
the eye for a while and didn't see anything puzzly on its surface. Surely
we were supposed to break this glass eye. Wasn't this puzzle titled
"A Show of Force", after all? Sarah, who had played sports, got ready
to toss the eye at the ground.

"It feels like it's meant to be broken."

"You say that about everything."

Corey Anderson was site monitor for this clue. He'd played with the Burnin'
Aiders up in Seattle, so he was ready to volunteer. Also, he'd done some
glassblowing himself, so he was a pretty good person to watch over a glass
studio. (You might be thinking: Where was Melinda? Doesn't she make glass
stuff also? We'd meet her later.) He trotted over when he noticed that
we were contemplating mayhem. He asked: would it be OK if the got a video
of us smashing the eye? Lots of teams had smashed theirs, but he hadn't
been quick enough to record any of them. Now Sarah had an audience plus
a recording for posterity to consider. The pressure was on, but she didn't
choke. She slammed that glass eye into the ground most triumphantly.
It wasn't made out of regular glass; instead of breaking into dangerous
shards, it turned into powder and not-so-sharp chunks, some of which
you can see bouncing in this photo:

Sarah smashes the glass eye

In the glass rubble, we found something that wasn't glass: a die. It was
still somewhat embedded in glass. We tried tossing it at the ground,
but it didn't break loose. Grinding it on the ground didn't get it, and
we ended up scraping it off with a pocketknife's screwdriver. But it
wasn't marked with the usual number of dots. This face had one dot,
this face had two dots, this face... also had two dots... and this face
had 23 dots. And one corner had an alpha.

We transcribed the dots onto paper. Nothing leaped out.
We tried looking at the cube
corner-on so that the alpha faced us: looking at the dots from that
corner, did they somehow make an A? Not really. Since we had just
blinded an eyeball, it was probably Braille, but how to get Braille
out of that face with 23 dots. But maybe we could interpret the other
faces as all the Braille vowels? That kind of worked, but we didn't
know what to do with that. Minutes passed. Our laptop had an
automatically-released hint for us! The hint told us: F = ma. As in
force equals mass times acceleration.
Looking at the dots around the "a", we saw 1 dot, 2 dots, 2 dots.
OK, that much made sense, but fundamentally...
We were lost.

Corey drifted by. One of us asked him a relevant
question: if we have this die, do we have everything we need?
Uhm, no. We were supposed to have two dice. Apparently when
glass fragments had gone flying, a fragment containing the rest
of our puzzle had flown extra-far. So we hunted around a bit
and found another die—it had landed under another team's
van so we hadn't seen it. Fortunately, during the minutes we'd
stared at one die, that team had solved the puzzle and driven
away, so now the die was revealed. We picked it up.

I didn't really get to see what happened next—the dice
didn't make it easy for a whole team to gather around, and the
answer popped out about a minute later: NEWTON.

The laptop liked that answer and showed us a video. The Mentalist,
a member of the Evil League of Evil, looked over our application.
And we'd unlocked the location of our next puzzle. There was some
confusion, based on how well you were able to see the laptop: as we
piled back into the van, someone was still trying to solve the video,
though it wasn't a puzzle. But eventually we got ourselves sorted out
and we were on our way to the next puzzle.

There was time to pause and reflect. We sure had come up with some
creative solutions to that single die. Maybe we should have put it
on the ground and pounded it instead of throwing it at the ground.
But with Corey wanting a video, you wanted to do some more interesting
than just pounding it.